Messi's World Ended: Argentina Now Eats Itself
The final whistle in the World Cup final does something to people.
Messi's World Ended: Argentina Now Eats Itself
The final whistle in the World Cup final does something to people. Not the winners — they have confetti and presidents and the long warm blur of celebration. It does something to the losers. It gets into the joints. It changes the shape of the next decade.
Lionel Messi won his World Cup in Qatar. He will not win another. And the days since Spain lifted the trophy have not been a team processing defeat with dignity — they have been something uglier, something that will follow Argentina's golden generation longer than the match itself ever would.
Javier Milei, the president of a country with an inflation crisis and a currency in freefall, found time to post his way through the aftermath on social media, adding a political temperature to a football disaster that needed none. The Argentina FA weighed in on conspiracy theories about the defeat. Players retired in emotional statements. The noise has been extraordinary — and almost entirely self-inflicted.
Here is the thing about great teams: they earn the right to lose badly. Argentina at this World Cup, carrying Messi into what may have been his final final, had that right. They earned it. And they are spending it poorly. Every conspiracy theory posted, every presidential rant, every tearful but pointed retirement announcement chips away at the architecture of what that generation built. Qatar 2022 was the masterpiece. This is the damaged frame.
What nobody is saying loudly enough — and the Mirror to its credit has gestured at it — is that Argentina's behaviour does not, cannot, absolve FIFA of its own accumulating debts to the integrity of this tournament. The Folarin Balogun ban that Norway are now considering challenging through FIFA's ethics committee is a wound that has not been dressed. It sits there, visible, while everyone watches the Argentine theatre. Infantino's organisation has been a masterclass in managing optics while avoiding accountability.
Meanwhile the market has already moved on. Kylian Mbappé sitting third in Transfermarkt's updated valuations after the tournament tells you that individual brilliance and collective failure can coexist on the same player's CV without anyone losing much money. The World Cup final is already being processed by agents and clubs and spreadsheets. Cristian Volpato of the Socceroos is allegedly testing positive for cocaine after two speeding charges in Sydney, which is the sort of story that appears at the end of tournaments when the adrenaline has nowhere left to go.
The World Cup is over. The arguments are just beginning.
That is, I have come to believe, exactly what the tournament was always for.
*Alex de Valletta, Sports & Culture Correspondent*
